Posts by PyLETS

The root zone is a very small and well known file

And ultimately, it's up to anyone configuring a DNS client to decide where to get it from.

It's true that ICANN has some infrastructure making signing of this more secure in connection with DNSSEC, compared to what a competing startup might have. This includes ability to have some but not all directors with smartcards able to get on planes to revoke the root key and cause another to be rolled over and established in the event it gets compromised. Not a trivial crytographic operation to manage all of this, though while hardly anyone uses DNSSEC hopefully it will become important within a few years.

So for stability purposes it would probably make more sense for ICANN to come under ITU managment than for the ITU or some collective formed by TLD DNS server operators to establish an alternative administration for the purpose. Selling off .porn and .coca-cola to the highest bidder really doesn't help the US argue that ICANN isn't broken. Those who believe in the right of all Americans to act as the world government will of course downvote this proposal.

But in realpolitik terms, getting the US to agree to it (if agreement is required instead of the rest of the world deciding to setup and manage an alternative root) will probably have to wait until the US wants something from the UN worth more to them than they value ICANN, and which other major countries could grant them but are not really that bothered about.

Much better to ferment it outside the body.

Look, making beer is easy and takes about 3-4 weeks unless you want it above 6% ABV. To make 23 litres takes about an hour to start it if you use spraymalt, and about an hour to bottle it. If you drink it quickly enough you don't even have to bottle it, a pressure keg will do just fine.

Useful to teach all of these things

C, C++, Python, Java or C#, software engineering development methodologies, databases, SQL, maths, data structures, object oriented design, AI, neural networks, operating systems, crypto, forensics, embedded systems, assembler, network routing algorithms, even machine architecture and machine code. Where I work ( clue: a newish University in the Midlands) we teach all of these things and merging our previoius Computing Science and Software Engineering schools strengthened both as well as the range and quality of our courses. Our stats show our graduates to be pretty much all employed. However, there's only room to include so many of these subjects on a 3 year undergraduate course if these are to be studied in any depth, so we can't in practice teach all of these subjects on all of our courses. So the selection of subjects depends upon whether our students want to study electronics or computer science, or games programming, or business IT, or networking and/or security or forensics based courses.

How the band got its name

"In the summer the NRL will begin balloon flights into storm systems, and there are also plans for a specially-shielded aircraft to search for gamma radiation."

As likely to fly as a lead zeppelin methinks.

Creating stable and local money is easy

Making it suitable for more than 2% of the economy is harder but should be possible.

I spend and earn some local money every month. Nothing to do with Bitcoins. In addition to UK Pounds a small amount of my (currently all post tax because it's not regular) income and expenditure is in Covs. We (Coventry LETS) are a group currently of about 50 people who support each other and trade and keep score, though we've had about 400 people in and out using our books over the 20 years we've been in operation. We don't need complex cryptography either. We started paper based, and now use a web application to keep score. The currency is issued by those creditworthy enough within the community for trading partners to be happy to hold a negative balance. It's all double entry bookkeeping. It stays local because that's how far good reputation extends. It stays stable because the money is as good as the reputation of those issuing it. Money earned on our system 20 years ago is spendable today based on our agreement that 1Cov is nominally equivalent to £1.

Why we need unconventional competition for global money, other than for criminal or gambling networks, is something I don't figure, because conventional money works quite well at preferring global trade to local trade. Those who trade globally don't pay taxes, those who trade locally do. Consequently the global trading space isn't where the real gaps in the economy exist. Becoming less dependant upon money as a national monopoly system where people think there can only be one kind of money requires a mechanism allowing local moneys to multiply and expand into taxable areas of income and expenditure, while retaining boundaries giving these currencies advantages in the trading contexts where local currencies can do well. These boundaries (like cell walls) require taxes on income/profits/value added in respect of local currencies becoming payable to the local authority or charities and exempt from taxes due in conventional money - with taxes on local money paid as transaction taxes and as an inherent function of the transaction occurring on the books where the local money exists.

Once currency exchange requires taxation as an inherent feature of the transactions, a more stable boundary between pairs of currencies is created because speculation and arbitrage can only occur based on genuine end-user requirements and never as an activity in its own right unconnected with such.

Used Debian stable for 9 years

And that's on a £15/month virtual machine. It's never crashed once, and always been updatable and upgradeable using apt-get between stable releases, and only needing lower level tools to resolve package management conflicts on very rare occasions. Over that period uptime has been better than 99.9% , largely thanks to the skills of the hosting company. The worst bug affecting it was a memory leak which affected a few months operations before an upgrade to the next stable release fixed it to the extent that while the bug was active it needed rebooting about every 3 weeks. It probably gets rebooted about 2-3 times a year on average. I've never successfully adopted the same approach for desktops - due to these being much more complex systems to maintain in comparison with stripped down servers not needing the overhead of a GUI. On a desktop a full reinstall every couple of years clears out much unwanted cruft and many anomalies. I'm intending to go to Wheezy this summer, at a time when I've got a couple of days to sort out any issues if any arise, but based on past experience there's a good chance there won't be any.

One reason it will break

So who is a communications provider within the terms of this legislation ? Every one of the students I teach how to do client server programming ? Is a UDP echo test outside of this elaborate monitoring scheme, but once you use a pair of UDP calls to exchange texts typed in at a console you have to tell plod who called whom and when ? Presumably not - because someone learning how to write to a client-server API is too small to be a communications provider within the terms of the legislation ? So they expect to be able to use the black boxes to pick up the traffic anyway in plain text ? Fine until budding programmer learns to do the same trick using TCP over SSL. The black boxes on large network nodes won't catch this traffic now as it's encrypted, so obtaining the metadata described would then mandate changes to every installed socket API library. That's when there really would be a spy in every box, and somehow I don't see that happening - except perhaps on boxes and OSs where you can't see, change or recompile your source code and you get the software from big bad corps which do deals with nasty government agencies behind closed doors. That's a good reason to use open source on anything still capable of running a compiler and/or installing a different kernel as if there wasn't reason enough already.

Old news and naked lobbyists

The fact that the limit on coal is based on how much of it you can afford to burn as opposed to how much is in the ground has been known well enough for a couple of decades now. The cost of different energy sources of course includes externalities - e.g. your and my increased insurance bill to cover losses resulting from weird weather and losses of those who can't afford insurance, (unless you're still in denial over the weird weather).

Yes there are externalities from other energy sources for example Mr Trump claiming the views from his newly acquired Scottish golf course will be spoiled by turbines several miles away, or the risk of living in the valley below a badly constructed hydro dam built in an earthquake zone, or the lifecycle management cost of nuclear waste.

Bring on a level playing field, but I doubt we all agree what that means, and I for one don't want all my energy eggs in one basket. I'm also sure Mr Trump can pay for more effective lobbyists to have the the wool pulled over our eyes than can a Chinese farmer living under the shadow of a new coal-fired power station to prevent us comparing like for like.